It's not what I can do

...to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours, by the righteousness of God and of our saviour Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:1)

After giving a glowing report about a conference like Share, it's easy to come away with the idea that if I follow a certain set of principles then my kids will turn out okay, my marriage will hold together, my faith will last. But in reality, these things are as uncertain as the rest of life. In the end, we are like Job, where there are no guarantees.

Peter reminds us that God's righteousness makes us who we are --and not anything we do. We are so often tempted to think that we succeed in whatever area of life because we are a little bit better than the person next to us. As I learned last summer, this is nothing less than than moral legalism.

I think that the devil learned his lesson in the episode with Job. He learned that it is absolutely impossible to derail God's people through evil, suffering and generally hard times. He has learned instead to deceive us through our blessing. Simply put, we end up thinking that we are blessed and we succeed by doing something. In the end this substitutes God's righteousness with something else. It takes our eyes off of Jesus and puts them on ourselves, and then the battle is lost.